Like the Tudor castles springing up in Bel Air and the half-timbered manors of Hancock Park, Lawry’s exists as an homage to a British institution its owner had never seen: the London restaurant Simpson’s in the Strand. And like those mansions, fitted out as they are with central heating, screening rooms and black-bottomed swimming pools, Lawry’s is actually better than the original: vast barons of good American beef cut to order tableside on enormous silver carts, and served with horseradish and Yorkshire pudding. Relocated across the street and restored to what it must have looked like in the ’30s, Lawry’s is that perfect Los Angeles thing, a simulacrum of a simulacrum of a simulacrum.

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